5.5 Estimate a Product or Service’s Environmental Impact
Being able to identify key issues with your website or application is essential, and while not a foolproof method, using tooling can help you achieve an overall idea about the state of your product or service’s environmental state (as such tools can do for accessibility).
Criteria
- Life-cycle Analysis: A full life-cycle Analysis based on the functional unit defined in Guideline 5.15 has been conducted.
- Competitor Analysis: The environmental impact of your or your competitor’s current service to inform decision-making (as a potential target goal) has been calculated.
- Tooling Impact: When identifying the environmental impact of your product or service, you must include the impact (or estimates of) of any tooling used to create the product or service along with any third-party solutions utilized in the pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions they generate from production to maintenance are considered integral to your overall solution.
Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium
Benefits
- Environmental:
Given their rigor, LCAs offer the biggest opportunities to reduce a digital product or service’s overall environmental impact through the identification and elimination of variables and vectors of digital emissions. - Social Equity:
While LCAs are primarily concerned with environmental impacts, they can incorporate intersectional social metrics as well to improve and consider issues like inequality which affect sustainability. - Accessibility:
Auditing for accessibility can potentially be included as a key part of a digital LCA, as long as parameters are defined upfront (such as WCAG conformance) and maintained throughout the project to ensure barriers to access are eliminated. - Performance:
Because they are so detailed, following LCA recommendations should improve product performance due to optimizations being quickly identified and checked off based on best practices.
GRI
- materials: Medium
- energy: Medium
- water: Medium
- emissions: Medium
Example
- Use an online carbon website footprint-checking tool such as EcoGrader, EcoPing, FootSprint, Sitigreen, or Website Carbon.
Resources
- [AFNOR] Spec 5.1.3 (French)
- Digital Eco-Design: Assess and measure
- ETSI ES 203 199 (PDF)
- [GPFEDS] 1.1 – Strategy (Assessment & Impact) (PDF)
- [GPFEDS] 1.5 – Strategy (Impact Goals) (PDF)
- [GPFEDS] 4.3 – UX and UI (Optimized Clickstream) (PDF)
- GreenIT: Appendices to the Report (PDF)
- GreenIT: Behind the Figures (PDF)
- GreenIT: Digital Technologies in Europe (PDF)
- Principles for Designing Sustainable Services
- Understanding Digital life-cycle Assessments
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 7 (Sustainable Energy)
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 8 (Economics & Work)
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 12 (Consumption & Production)